2001-08-20 - 7:51 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Dreams", Fleetwood Mac

Good golly, I'm tired.

We were up 'til 1am talking to Papa on Saturday, and I woke up at 7:45. That's bad. It'll take me another good night's sleep to recover.

Poindexter was telling his sister over the weekend that I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, anywhere. Trains, planes, automobiles, whatever. Makes him jealous. My father is the same way. My mom complains that when they go on vacation together, he's passed out before the plane even takes off. She still thinks flying is exciting, but he doesn't since he travels a lot for business.

Usually if I want to sleep, I turn off my hearing aids. It blocks out all but the lowest pitches. On a plane I can still hear the lower pitches of the drone of the engines, but nothing else. But that's not actually necessary. I can still sleep even when I hear things going on around me.

Yesterday evening, for example, after a (GREAT!) bacon cheeseburger from Five Guys, we were watching episodes of "Northern Exposure" that we'd taped. I was full, which didn't help, and so tired that I really could not keep my eyes open anymore. So I told Poindexter to stop the tape and watch ESPN while I napped, because I couldn't take it anymore.

So he did, and I curled up and dropped my head on his shoulder and passed right out.

The whole time, I could hear the television. I could especially tell when he changed channels or commercials came on. But I was so tired I just slept. For 20-30 minutes.

Kinda freaky! But it's certainly a talent I'm lucky to have.

So, we were in Florida this weekend. I went to Butterfly World with MIL and the nieces. I liked this place quite a bit. It's a beautiful, lush, green place, and it's amazing to have colorful butterflies just flitting all around -- there are at least four in this photo, including one near the black post on the lower right.:

That's my younger niece, checking for butterflies on her elbow. Apparently when the place is less crowded, and if you're wearing perfume, the butterflies will sometimes land on you. None of us were lucky enough to have that happen.

Birds, on the other hand ... I decided to cheat and pay a buck for some kind of sweet fruit goop (smelled like mango or papaya) in a little cup and have five birds land on me at once (there's one on my shoulder that's hard to see):

Although bird claws are a tad painful, this was really fun. I liked it so much I went and got more fruit goop, and that time a bird landed on my HEAD (I was wearing a hat at that time) and stayed there for quite a while, much to the nieces' amusement. Unfortunately my camera was packed away in my bad so MIL didn't get picture of that.

The first night we were there, Poindexter and the girls got into a big pillow fight. I got a bunch of photos. Here's one of Poindexter scrambling for another pillow as the girls converge on him:

There was just a little too much pink this weekend! All pink, all the time. Even I was wearing pink! Blearygh. They put a pink scrunchie in Poindexter's hair (sorry for the bad photoshopping; I was just trying to highlight the ponytail 'cause the photo was too dark):

I read a lot of Shel Silverstein poems to them, since MIL had a copy of "Where the Sidewalk Ends". They were actually a little too young (6.5 and 4.5) to grasp much of what was going on in a lot of them. I went on the web to get Ticklish Tom, my favorite of all time, but the last two lines -- "Rumble, rumble, whistle, roar/Tom ain't ticklish anymore" -- got nothing but blank stares from the kids. Papa, however, was laughing from across the room.

My younger niece wanted to hear the same two poems over and over:

"I'll swing
from my ankles,
She'll cling
to your knees
As you hang
by your nose
From a high-up trapeze.
But just one thing, please,
As we float through the breeze --
Don't sneeze."

That, plus, "I'm Reginald Clark, I'm afraid of the dark", ending with "So please don't shut this book on me." I think she liked that one mainly because we would slam the book shut and scream as though we were Reginald Clark in the dark.

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